“We are convinced no great civilization ever existed up there. And there are no archaeological discoveries of importance to be made.”

CHAPTER 6

We took canoes into the heart of darkness.

For three-quarters of a century, Morde’s tall tale, so rich in romance and adventure, has given impetus to the fable of the lost city. The White City or Monkey God legend became a part of the Honduran national psyche, a tale familiar even to schoolchildren. In 1960, the Honduran government drew a line around two thousand square miles of the largely unexplored interior of Mosquitia and called it the Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Reserve. In 1980, UNESCO named the area the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve and, two years later, declared this unique rainforest a World Heritage Site. Meanwhile, ambitious explorers continued to make dubious and unverified claims of having found the lost city, while many archaeologists suspected a city of that nature might exist, in some form, deep in the jungle, either near Morde’s claimed area or somewhere else. In 1994, the chief of archaeology for the Honduran government, George Hasemann, said in an interview that he believed all the large sites in Mosquitia may have been part of a single political system whose center, the White City, had not yet been found.

Steve Elkins first heard of the White City from an adventurer named Steve Morgan, who was a professional collector of legends and stories. Morgan had compiled a list of what he considered to be the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and he had boxes of files of research into various lost cities, pirate treasures, ancient tombs, and shipwrecks loaded with gold. Morgan engaged in marine salvage for a living and had actually found a number of shipwrecks. His house was full of stacks of Chinese porcelain and chests heaped with silver Spanish reals and pieces of eight. Elkins, who owned a business in LA renting camera equipment to television production crews, decided he wanted to go into television production himself, since he had the gear. He consulted Morgan and pored over his list of unsolved mysteries with fascination. Two mysteries attracted Elkins’s special attention: the legend of Ciudad Blanca and the Loot of Lima, also known as the Cocos Island treasure.

Elkins and Morgan teamed up, did some research into Ciudad Blanca, and identified an area in Mosquitia they thought might contain it. They organized an expedition, led by Morgan. Elkins sold the idea of a television show about the search to Spiegel TV in Germany.

Elkins, his German coproducer and correspondent, along with his California film crew, arrived in Honduras in 1994. They hired a local fixer, a man named Bruce Heinicke, to handle logistics. A childhood friend of Morgan’s, Heinicke was an American married to a Honduran. He’d been doing business in Honduras for many years as a gold prospector, drug smuggler, treasure hunter, and archaeological looter. While the choice of a man like Heinicke might have seemed eccentric, the expedition required someone who not only knew his way around Honduras but also had a keen understanding of when and how to bribe people (a delicate art), how to manage Honduran bureaucracy, how to intimidate and threaten, and how to deal with dangerous criminals without getting killed. Elkins recalled seeing Heinicke for the first time in the airport parking lot after their arrival. He was a big fat guy dressed in a pineapple shirt, pinky ring and gold watch, cigarette dangling from his mouth, with a wad of bills in his fist. He was barking orders in Spanish and passing out money. “We got a video of him,” said Elkins. “It’s hilarious.”

It would be the beginning of a long and complicated relationship.

The crew filmed in Copán and then took a bush flight to a little town called Palacios on the Mosquito Coast. From there they set off into the interior, with indigenous guides and a rough idea of where the lost city might be, based on their research and interviews.

“We took canoes into the heart of darkness,” Elkins remembered. Morgan led the expedition, hiring local informants who claimed to know of an area deep in the mountains where there were ruins. “To be honest,” Elkins said, “I just tagged along. I really didn’t know where the fuck we were going.”

The canoes were forty-foot dugouts, hollowed out of a single mahogany tree trunk, equipped with small outboard Evinrudes. Each could fit six people and a bunch of gear. “We went up some little river. I don’t even know the name of it.” Upstream the water became so shallow and full of sunken logs and mud bars that they had to raise the engines and propel themselves along by poling. They went miles and miles through endless swamps and up unknown tributaries, following wavering, uncertain maps. “We were constantly in and out of the canoes, in the muck. It got denser and denser and denser, until we were up high in the mountains.”

There was no sign of any lost cities, but they did make a discovery. “All of a sudden there was this big boulder in a stream,” Elkins said, “with a carving on it showing a guy with a fancy headdress planting seeds.” He had what he called an “epiphany”—here was proof, if more were needed, that a sophisticated and mysterious people had once lived and farmed in a land that today was deep, uninhabited jungle. Led by local Indian guides, Elkins and the group pushed on, forced to abandon their canoes and continue on foot, slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. On a hard day’s travel they were lucky to make one or two miles. Steve and his crew ate MREs, while the Indian guides ate iguanas. At one point the guides became agitated; taking out their weapons, they confided that the group was being tracked by jaguars. They frequently ran into venomous snakes and were assaulted day and night by insects. “After I came out,” Elkins recalled, “I had bites for six months.” He was grateful not to have been stricken with one of the many frightful tropical diseases common to the area.